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As my friend David Fleming
once wrote, conventional economics ‘puts the grim into reality.’

Something of a radical, back in the 1970s Fleming was involved in
the early days of what is now the Green Party of England and Wales. Frustrated
by the mainstream’s limited engagement with ecological thinking, he urged his
peers to learn the language and concepts of economics in order to confound the
arguments of their opponents.

By the time I met Fleming in 2006, he had practised what he preached
and earned himself a PhD in Economics. But he never lost his aversion for the
‘economism’ that presumes that matters of public policy, employment, ecology
and culture can be interpreted mainly in terms of mathematical abstractions.

Worse, he noted that even the word ‘economics’ has the power
to make these life-defining topics seem impenetrable, none-of-our-business and,
of all things, boring. Fleming’s work was all about returning them to
their rightful owners—those whose lives are shaped by them, meaning all of us.

Reminding us that our present growth-based market economy has only
been around for a couple of hundred years (and is already hitting the buffers),
Fleming’s lifework looks to the great majority of human history for insight:
“We know what we need to do,” he
writes, “We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain
dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.”

What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—communityand culture are key. He
quotes, for example, the
historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages:

“The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent
both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told,
holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of
the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors.
The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two
Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted
that holidays totaled five months per year.”

Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like
the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots
would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an
abundance of leisure time. So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk
of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our
technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming
explains,

“In a
competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure
time – say, a three-day working week, or less – is hard to sustain, because any
individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower
price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater
quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one
more cheaply). These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and
would put the more leisurely out of business completely. This is what puts the
grim into reality.”

So in an
economy like ours, a technological advance that doubles the amount of useful
work a person can do in a day becomes a problem rather than a benefit. It tends
to put half the workers out of work, turning them into a potential drain on the
state.

Of course,
in theory all the workers could just work half-time and still produce all that
is needed, much as Tomorrow’s World
predicted. But in practice they are often afraid of having their pay cut, or losing
their jobs to a stranger who is willing to work longer hours, so they can’t
take the steps needed to solve their collective economic problems and enjoy
more leisurely lives. Instead, people are kept busy partly through what
anthropologist David Graeber memorably characterised as “bullshit jobs.”

How, then, can we feed, house and support ourselves without working
as relentlessly as we do today? Fleming’s work explores the answer, making a
rigorous case that we need to get beyond mainstream economists’ ideas of
minimising ‘spare labour’ if we are to sustain a post-growth economy. This ‘spare
labour’ is what most of us would call spare time—a welcome part of a life well
lived rather than a ‘problem of unemployment.’

He highlights that the holidays of former times were far from a
product of laziness. Rather they
were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for. ‘Spare time’
spent in feasting, performing, collaborating and merrymaking together formed
the basis of community bonding and membership. Those shared cultural ties hold people
together, even in the absence of economic growth and full-time employment. When
productivity improves, as one of
his readers put it, “in our system you have a problem, in Fleming’s system
you have a party.”

Under the current economic paradigm, the only way to keep
unemployment from rising to the point where the population can’t be supported
is through endless economic growth, which thus becomes an obligation. So we are
damned if we grow and damned if we don’t, since endless growth will eventually cross
every conceivable biophysical boundary and destroy the planet’s ability to
support us. That’s why, in practice, we just keep growing and cross our fingers
that somehow it will all work out. As
Fleming writes:

“The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on
mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well
on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is
reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in
obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such
insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of
religion.”

Technological
fixes do not help, as we are all discovering to our cost. We are already working
ever harder, and with ever more advanced technologies, yet the hope of a better
future dwindles day-by-day. Take heart though, for when the current paradigm transparently
provides nothing but a dead end, we can be sure that we are on the cusp of a
fundamental shift.

Fleming provides a radical but historically-proven alternative: focusing
neither on the growth or de-growth of the market economy, but the huge expansion
of the ‘informal’ or non-monetary economy—the ‘core economy’ that allows our
society to exist, even today. This is the economy of what we love: of the
things we naturally do when not otherwise compelled, of music, play, family,
volunteering, activism, friendship and home.

At
present, this core non-monetary economy is much weakened, pushed out and
wounded by the invasion of the market. Fleming’s work demonstrates that
nurturing it back to health is not just some quaint and obsolete sharing
longing but an absolute practical priority.

The key
challenge of today, for Fleming, is to repair the atrophied social structures
on which most human cultures have been built; to rediscover how to rely on each
other rather than on money alone. Then life after the painful yet inevitable
end to the growth of the monetary economy will start to seem feasible again,
and our technological progress can bring us the fruits it always promised.

It’s increasingly clear that this is the conversation we all need to
have, and Fleming’s compelling, grounded vision of a post-growth world is rare
in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of human
beings to nurse our economy, ecology and culture back to health. I am proud to
have played a part in bringing it to the world; in fact, it might just be the
best thing I have done.